Audio Design / Composition / Installation
THE VANISHING ACT created by Ian Geers & Lauren Grace Thompson
Sound Designer
A Rambling Absurdity in 12 Parts
In 1699, at the premiere of his newest masterpiece, renowned stage magician Jean Jacquline Lemarque caused the 2nd or 3rd greatest disappearance-related theatrical tragedy in history…
In 1932, a prickly German theater artist, an American conman, and an unfortunately-named mechanical engineer globetrot from Berlin to Paris to Hollywood, encountering artistic geniuses, secret societies, and plagiarists in an attempt to unfold the mystery of Lemarque’s Vanishing Act... or at the very least avoid doing any actual work.
A farce, a heist, a con, a murder mystery, and a disappearing act all at once, The Vanishing Act finds a slew of off-color characters at odds with art, fame, magic, and history in the making.
Design credits on: Season 1 Episode 11 “The Bottle” ; Season 2 Episode 1 “The Christmas Kiss” ; Season 2 Episode 2 “The Christmas Con”
For more on The Vanishing Act, click here.
Image courtesy of Pivot Arts
Video Design & Graphics by Tony Churchill
Superfluxus co-conceived by Seth Bockley and Drew Paryzer
Sound and Music Design
SUPERFLUXUS is an eerie, psychedelic, and interactive sci-fi adventure story. Originally intended as an immersive theater and installation project, the artists re-imagined SUPERFLUXUS as a choose-your-own-adventure text and video Web experience, set in a surreal and sinister lunar landscape in the year 2120. This virtual journey gives audiences a flavor of what will ultimately become a live immersive experience in the not-too-distant, but still very strange, future.
Produced and developed by Pivot Arts as part of their new work development program for the Pivot Arts Festival 2020. A link to the launch site can be found here.
Audio design for the project included songwriting and music production (“have me” performed by Mary Williamson, video by Tony Churchill), looping music (examples 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5), ambient audio (examples 1 | 2 | 3), sound effects (examples 1 | 2), and synthesis.
Unwell: a Midwestern Gothic Mystery
Sound Designer
A fiction podcast about conspiracies, ghosts, and unusual families of blood and choice.
Lillian Harper moves to the small town of Mt. Absalom, Ohio, to care for her estranged mother Dorothy after an injury. Living in the town's boarding house which has been run by her family for generations, she discovers conspiracies, ghosts, and a new family in the house's strange assortment of residents.
Design credits on: Welcome to Mt. Absalom (trailer), Season 1 Episode 10: The Devil’s in the Details
For more on Unwell, click here.
OVER/under, a multichannel sonic composition
Composer
I like to say that OVER/under happened by accident, or at least its contents are from a discovery I never intended to make. After rendering several long, low-frequency sine sweeps in Csound, I noticed multiple pitches sounding in the files created. When I overlapped files, an extra pulsation effect occurred - that’s when I got to work.
OVER/under was played as part of the multichannel repertoire featured in the UNPOP exhibit at Burning Man 2019. The same repertoire is featured in the HearRing tour of Chicago parks during September 2019.
While composed for a four-channel (quad) system, you can listen to a stereo mix of the composition here.
Elephants, an interactive sound installation
Creator, Designer, & Developer
Elephants is a sound installation that I conceived and built as my capstone project for my master’s studies at Northwestern University. It was largely inspired by roommate-at-the-time’s tendency to walk heavily through our apartment, but I am sure that anyone who has ever had upstairs neighbors can also relate to the sonic ideas presented. In short, Elephants turns footsteps into outlandish cacophony. The pad in the center of the arrangement senses footsteps and tracks the sound as a bass frequency to a coordinating woofer. The woofers are filled with loud, metallic objects that buzz, rattle, and chime with each step. The pad and woofer boxes were all custom built and assembled by myself. The entire system was coordinated through a MAX/MSP patch that coordinated Arduino input (sensors) with the sonic output (speakers).
Video of interaction with the installation can be found here.
Starlife
Composer
To the left is a MIDI rendering of a piano composition written for a creative project in an astronomy course I took in my undergraduate studies. It's inspired by the life cycle of a star, following the stages of star development from the beginning of formation through death. It sounds like video game music, too, right? (Kenyon College Spring 2013)